Author: Bryan Walker

Key contradictions

Gareth’s post on James Hansen’s talk at the University of Canterbury carried a link to a recent report that the Prime Minister supports the intentions of Solid Energy to develop the Southland lignite fields. The contrast between the warnings of Hansen and the bland assumptions of Key was painful.

Key speaks straight business as usual:

“At the moment companies like Solid Energy are growth companies and we want them to expand in areas like lignite conversion.”

“We know there is lots of resource there and we know they potentially have the capability [to convert lignite to urea or diesel] and so we will see how that progresses, but the briquette plant is a good starting point.”

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Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist

The Ecology of Commerce Revised Edition: A Declaration of SustainabilityIn 1994 Ray Anderson, a captain of industry, founder and CEO of the large and successful carpet tile company Interface, was indicted as a plunderer of the earth.  At least that’s how he describes what happened when he took up Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce and read it overnight. It marked a turning-point for his petroleum-intensive company which set out on a journey towards a zero environmental footprint, with 2020 as the deadline. The story to date is told in his new book Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist. I’d seen reference elsewhere to the fresh path the company had taken, and turned to the book with some interest but not expecting the intellectual rigour and full environmental awareness that I encountered, expressed in engaging and energetic prose. It’s a notable book which well deserves wide attention.

The company began with this exacting goal of sustainability which was to inform their journey:

“To operate this petroleum-intensive business in a manner that takes from the earth only that which is naturally and rapidly renewable – not one fresh drop of oil – and to do no harm to the biosphere.”

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Hotspots hit poor hardest

Another report this week drives home the message that the world’s poorer people are going to suffer the early and potentially devastating effects of climate change. The report is the work of the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) programme associated with the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a group of food research organisations.

The report, Mapping Hotspots of Climate Change and Food Insecurity in the Global Tropics, was produced by a team of scientists responding to what CCAFS describes as an urgent need to focus climate change adaptation efforts on people and places where the potential for harsher growing conditions poses the gravest threat to food production and food security.

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A Perfect Moral Storm

A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (Environmental Ethics & Science Policy Series)Humanity is facing an extreme risk from unabated climate change. The science is widely understood and accepted. Yet we seem paralysed when it comes to reducing the threat: in spite of 20 years of international talk emissions continue to rise alarmingly. The dangerous political inertia which besets us is investigated in Stephen Gardiner’s book A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change. It’s a philosopher’s take on the issue, thorough and elucidatory, yet entirely accessible for general reader — Gardiner even helpfully indicates when a more technical discussion can be safely skipped without losing the thread.

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Grim news on emissions

The Guardian, with the exception of the foolishness of its analysis of the climategate emails, is one of the world media’s bright spots when it comes to recognising and communicating the realities of climate change. It carried grim news yesterday. Environment correspondent Fiona Harvey reported International Energy Agency (IEA) unpublished estimates that greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history.

“Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.”

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